Photo by Alex Holmes

D uring the winter Tokyo becomes a single mass of grey upon grey. Cold weather sets in, the scant greenery subsides, and the few large parks seem unable to contain the invasion of concrete all around. Far away from the neon-glitz of downtown Shibuya, suburbs and mid-points remain quiet in their anonymity. Some less anonymous places have other reasons for silence.

Straight from the sixth exit of Kudanshita station lies the infamous Yasukuni shrine. A huge promenade and two looming Torii gates lead the way into this, the resting place of the souls of the Japanese Imperial Army.

On every side, blackened cherry blossom trees sprout leafless like menacing tentacles, exacerbating the dark colours of the main shrine. A pristine white cloth with artful patterns hangs on the front, giving the place striking contrasts of imperial grandeur. Outside, neo-fascists bow reverentially while sombre temple girls carry on with their duties. The tone is grave and the execution martial.

This is not a happy place.

Once the hub of religious imperial frenzy, Yasukuni is both the lovechild and the lover of Japan's extreme right. Its name literally means "peaceful country," but it would be wrong to assume Yasukuni is a monument to pacifism. Quite the opposite, Yasukuni is a place of reverence to the heroic feats of Japan during every war since the Meiji restoration, when the shrine was founded.

This includes Japan's invasion of several Asian countries and World War II. Not only are the names of over 2.5 million soldiers revered here, but also the souls of Japan's biggest war criminals are supposed to rest within its dark halls. These include 14 Class A criminals, such as former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and general Iwane Matsui, one of the people formally responsible for the Nanjing massacre (aka the "Rape of Nanking") in 1937. The concept of peace impulsed by Yasukuni, in short, is the kind exercised through a gun barrel.

On one of the sides of the main building there is a large box with a number of leaflets about the shrine and the many organisations that support it. In one of them, a peace dove explains how the War was necessary to maintain Japan's independence, to make it a truly peaceful country and spread its peace through Asia.

Another leaflet tells how only by fighting in Asia could the continent be rid of the "white menace." Yet another leaflet advertises a documentary which tells the "true" story of the war, from Japan's altruistic pan-Asian intentions to the unfairness of the Tokyo War Trials.

"Show this to your children and grandchildren," says the ad, "to raise their awareness and patriotsm."

Yet, for all its conspicuous propaganda, Yasukuni itself is not the blatant monument to imperialism one wishes it to be (as it would be much easier to ignore that way). It is not a shrine built on revisionism, but rather the latter follows as a consequence of the nature of the place. Yasukuni is a memorial which caters to feelings, not history. The feelings in question are those of "patriots" and their families. And because this is ultimately a religious site, propaganda is shrouded under the guise of morality, a mixture of culture, piety and pride, based on honour, heroism and suffering.

The suffering of the soldiers' families — pointed out repeatedly in several inscriptions around the shrine - is the kind of moral detergent used to review history from the point of view of the aggressor as a victim. It is not unlike the constant references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki one finds in Japanese history books, to show that neither side is ever free of guilt. Albeit a sound argument, it is one that requires objectivity and a large degree of introspection, too.

The lack of either in Japanese post-war rhetoric is enough to write off Yasukuni's imperialist arguments of Japan's "just" war. And yet, the fact remains that human lives were lost, and suffering - though far less brutal than in the colonies - was as much a reality in Japan as it was elsewhere.

This is the stepping stone that the Yasukuni establishment uses and exploits, by justifying the war through vicarious suffering. Their mission is not to give an objective account of history, but to describe it in moral/religious terms. Thus, sending millions of children to their deaths was not only necessary: it was heroic, pure and borne out of duty. In the Yasukuni mindset, the soldiers are innocent because their intentions were pure, laying their lives for their country trying to create a utopic world. Nazism was not too different. Yet we do not find memorials to fallen SS officers in Germany these days.

Culturally conditioned pride -"face"- plays a big role in this. Denying the souls the purity of their ideals would bring shame upon the suffering of the families who have already paid the price of defeat. It's a particularly diabolical argument: that of sustaining the sanctitude of human life by showing complete disregard for it at the same time. And yet reason might not be enough to deal with pride. For what good are arguments to assuage the pain of an aching mother who has just lost her son?

On emotional grounds, then, Yasukuni could be justified at an individual level. The problems happen when these cases are brought into the political arena. When the Prime Minister visits the shrine in his capacity as such, he is representing an individual emotional matter as a collective national issue. It is not the suffering of a family anymore, but the suffering of the Japanese nation as a family. The great lie of nationalism is fed through individual pain. This, at the same time, gives itself to further political machinations where purity of action through following orders becomes an excuse for bloody deeds, putting ideological principles on top of life and civility.

When history is explored in religious terms it makes way for political agendas. In Yasukuni's case, the agenda is to legitimise a particularly ruthless and self-righteous -but more to the case, outdated- brand of authoritarianism.

As the tourists around me took pictures of the shrine, I overheard a conversation between an American woman — an expat living in Japan — and her visiting friends. She was explaining the controversial history of Yasukuni to her guests, when she said something that caught my attention.

"Many war criminals are honoured in here, yet I feel we might not be too different in the US. After all, our war criminals are still alive and in office."

Here was the introspection needed to understand places like Yasukuni, the same argument that the shrine in all its monumental pomposity lacked. It was, ironically, brought forth by the blatant attempts all around us to obscure history. Inadvertently, Yasukuni had become an ad for values opposite to those it exalted.

The cold winter sun shone through the leafless branches, but from where I stood the black Torii gates suddenly didn't look so big and menacing anymore.